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DevNet Day is now scheduled for June 18. We appreciate your understanding as we paused to focus on current events. We look forward to joining our extended community of developers. Thank you to all who have registered, you’ll receive confirmation shortly. If you have not yet registered, there’s still time to Register Now.

Now, more than ever, data center networking is critical to our daily lives. Whether that data center is housing critical applications or Minecraft servers, on-prem or running somewhere else, we all depend on our data centers to keep our business moving.

Data Center network automation and programmability

As we move into a world of not just one data center in one location, but one comprised of colors and clouds, data center network programmability has become more important than ever to make sure that the infrastructure is agile, flexible, and secure enough to handle today’s demanding workloads. (You simply don’t have enough fingers to type fast enough to keep up with a team of coffee drinking application developers and their infrastructure requests!)

We’ve all had “learning network programmability and automation” on our To-Do lists — so why not start now with the DCN track at DevNet Day? This breakout track will arm you with the tools that you need in order to prepare you for every step in your automation journey, whether you’re just getting started or an automation ninja.

The track will kick-off with two start-now sessions; one focused on ACI and one on open NX-OS. These sessions will show you just how easy it is to get started using programming concepts against your datacenter network, regardless of whether you use ACI or NX-OS mode on your switches. The best part about it — you don’t even need to use your own infrastructure to get started! All demonstrations will be done against our Always-On Sandboxes using the ACI Sandbox or the NX-OS Sandbox!

Explore the power of open APIs

Once we cover the basics, we’ll begin to explore just how powerful the open APIs on the platforms really are. We’ll…

  • dive into application and container hosting on Nexus switches
  • show just how many data center networking tasks can be automated and orchestrated using Ansible (spoiler alert: you *really can* Ansible all the things)
  • discuss integrations with NAE and ACI with ServiceNow to get a completely self-driving network
  • break down what it really means to have a CI/CD pipeline with network devices
  • (and we’ll decode and decipher all of the complicated-sounding stuff).

To top it all off — we’ll look at a new way to automate the ACI deployment, both on-prem and in the cloud, using Terraform. You really can deploy your infrastructure with your choice of tools, Nexus data center platforms let you do what you need to do, how you want to do it!

Resources and info for your learning journey

The DevNet Day breakout session is short — but your learning journey doesn’t have to (and shouldn’t) stop.  DevNet has the online resources and information you need to get started, including API guides, documentation, and labs. Here are some helpful links to keep you going:

Finally, if you’re itching to adopt automation in your environment, there is DevNet Automation Exchange, a curated set of targeted use-cases meant to solve today’s problems with programmability against the platforms you are using. There are a ton of repositories for both ACI and NX-OS:

These code repositories solve real-world problems and can be applied to your environment with a few tweaks. To top it off, they are sorted by “walk”, “run”, or “fly”, based on how complex or impactful the automation is to your network; we want to make sure that your environment (and your reputation) is kept intact while you leverage programmability in your network.

Don’t miss DevNet Day, June 18

With all of this, there’s really no better time to get started on your DC networking programmability journey. We have the sandboxes, the resources, and the knowledge to share.

Register now. You definitely won’t regret it.

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Authors

Quinn Snyder

Senior Technical Advocate

Learning & Certifications